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Does Your Environment Need SMB Tuning?

Thursday, 31 May 2007 by Michel Roth

As part of preparing for my presentation for BriForum Europe, my colleague Jeroen van der Kamp and I did a lot of work on looking into the ever-present performance bottlenecks in Server Based Computing environments when it comes to File serving, typical SMB traffic. As part of this preparation we developed a script that very quickly uses up a lot of Current Commands, one of the most important elements in SMB traffic.

I've written a couple of articles on the subject of SMB tuning, the most well-known being "Lanmanserver and Lanmanworkstation Tuning" but this still doesn't make it easy do identify these problems in practise. To this end my colleague Jeroen van der Kamp has written an article at the Login Consulants website which describes how can simulate a SMB bottleneck.

"Recently, we have seen many articles on the Internet about the importance of SMB tuning in Terminal Server environments. I can only emphasize the importance of SMB tuning. We have been tuning SMB for many years now, and often we have seen the lack of SMB tuning as the primary cause for performance problems.

File & Print services uses the SMB protocol. The problem is likely to occur in environments where many (50+) open connections are made from a single Windows machine to a single Windows file server (this is typical for Citrix/Terminal Server environments).

When the limit is reached, all users and apps are affected on that Citrix/Terminal server, causing random pauses for approximately 10-15 seconds. Applications which are not using file & print services will not be affected (calc.exe is a nice example)."

Read the article here.